Andy, I wish I could get him to talk to a client of mine. This woman is in her fifties now, is in a wheelchair due to a degenerative condition she was born with. Because she was considered, as a child, to be "retarded" (as they called it then) they never bothered much with her at school. As she describes it, she was "left". To her own devices, I assume. She also was in and out of hospital with operations, getting fitted with calipers etc. and eventually her parents just didn't bother sending her back to school.
She wrote a book about her life - she married, had twins, her husband was abusive so eventually she left him, they are now back together (after being divorced) but on her terms.
I edited and published her book. It was a nightmare - but I wanted to help her. She can't spell for nuts, had no idea of punctuation, has problems with her hands so her typing is a bit hit and miss anyway. Her computer ability - it's all self-taught. EVERYTHING is self-taught.
The text she sent me was a mess. Plus, with her appalling spelling, she had put it through a Microsoft SPELL CORRECTOR first. So I couldn't even do a manual spell check and guess what she might have been trying to say - the computer had mangled it all. Using the spell correction software, it had replaced each word with the word it thought was closest. After it had done this with four or five different words in the same sentence, what was left made no sense.
So you should never count on using a computer's spell correction or spell checker to get you out of trouble. I had months and months of work just trying to decipher what she had written and turn it into understandable English! Lucky for me, the book wasn't too long, although what she sent me was about 30,000 words. A lot of it was also accidentally duplicated, so I was tidying up the same text over and over, until I realised.
Two lessons in this - first, learning to spell will always be of value, no matter what you think you will do with your life. And second, it doesn't matter how much other people put you down and tell you that you haven't got the ability for this or that, you can accomplish surprising things that you might never have thought possible. All you have to do is give it a go!
My friend's book has now gone into reprints. She's writing more to put into the book. The text she sends me now is much better spelled, much better punctuated - in general, she has improved immensely as a writer - remarkable for someone who was considered to be illiterate.
Marg
